Dark Seo

“Users can type in two different cities, or airport codes, in the Google search box to bring up two boxes for entering departing and returning flight dates. Below those are links to the travel Web sites Expedia, Hotwire and Orbitz. Clicking on one of those links leads directly to flight options for your selected itinerary on that site,” according to CNET News.com.

“Google is testing a new search feature for specific flight inquiries between two points,” according to the company.

Another report, on searchenginewatch.com, said: “Since we first blogged about Google offering direct links to online travel databases (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz) a few days ago if city pairs are placed in the web search box, others have picked up on yet another Google test. The new service is primarily about accessing pricing info, timetables etc. This is different than the flight info “shortcuts”, “Smart Answers”, etc., that most of the major web engines, the airlines themselves, and others have been offering for several years. For example, if you enter an airline and flight number into Yahoo, Google, or Ask Jeeves info about where the flight is located and when it will be landing is provided. Most of this data applies to flights in the U.S./Canada aviation system. So, if it’s a European flight heading to the U.S. or Canada it should be in there. Exceptions do exist and not every service provides access to every airline.”

For a recent comparative literature class paper, Brendan Draper wanted to quote a phrase from a novel he had read, but he couldn’t remember what page it was on.
He typed “nervous condition” into Internet search giant Google’s index of books. Within seconds, he found the phrase and page number of the book. “It was extremely helpful,” says Draper, 20, a student at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Situations like his are exactly what Google had in mind a year ago when it unveiled the Google Print project at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, on hand for the event, told publishers they wanted to scan their books, at no cost, to make them searchable online and to help sell copies to consumers.
A year later, Google finds itself in the position of having to defend itself to the industry.
The Google Print homepage — www.print.google.com — lets users search for a phrase, character or other term to turn up a link to a related book title.
The entire contents of public domain books are available for viewing; for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only bibliographic data and snippets.
Content in Google Print comes from two sources: publishers and libraries. Google infuriated publishers after it announced an alliance in December with five libraries, including Harvard and the University of Michigan, to scan their entire collections. Google said its objective was to build the world’s largest online card catalog.
Some critics in the book industry fear the library program will spark the kind of piracy problems that have beset the music and film industries. To appease publishers, Google suspended plans to scan copyrighted books until Nov. 1, although it still is scanning books at the request of copyright holders.
“Google is taking our property and not paying for it. It’s burglary,” says Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild, a New York-based association that has filed a copyright infringement suit against Google. The Association of American Publishers supports the suit.
Google won’t say how many books are in its index, but you are more likely to find older titles than best-sellers. Ninety percent of the books at Google Print are from the publisher program, Smith says. He says more library books will start to show up in the coming months.
Publishers from some of the bigger houses participate in Google Print, as do small tech-book houses such as Peachpit Press and O’Reilly Publishing.
“We’re in favor of any program that can give our books more exposure,” says Adam Rothberg, a Simon & Schuster vice president.
Like other publishers, he is opposed to Google scanning books without permission. “It’s not right to take the attitude, ‘Copy now and ask permission later,’ ” he says.
One of the main sticking points is Google’s controversial “opt out” policy, in which it asks publishers to specifically request that a work not be included.
For Google to scan books “without our permission is a clear violation of copyright law,” says Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press.
Jed Lyons, CEO of independent academic press Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, recently pulled all titles from Google Print to protest the library initiative. “I view Google as a massive threat to our intellectual property,” he says.

Cingular Wireless is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone.

The new service, powered by OZ Communications Inc., is designed to adapt the look and capabilities of a Web portal or e-mail program such as Outlook to the limited screen size, keyboard and processing power of a garden variety handset.

The Java-based e-mail application initially will be available to download on existing phones starting Monday with 5 models from Motorola Inc. and one from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. It also is being pre-installed on new phones, though not immediately through all Cingular sales channels.

There’s no monthly charge for Cingular Mobile Email, but users will need to subscribe to one of the company’s wireless Internet plans with a monthly allotment of data usage. Jim Ryan, a Cingular vice president, said a $5 monthly data plan should provide sufficient capacity to check one’s e-mail a few times daily.

Google (Quote, Chart) expanded its Google Print service, launching book-specific search services in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain.

Each new service has its own localized interface, and, at this point, a limited number of books available. But searchers in one country may see book results from other national indexes.

Jim Gerber, Google’s director of content partnerships, said that all books in the international print search program had been acquired through publisher partnership programs in those countries. He said that the initial versions, available as beta services through Google Labs, will help publishers understand what the service will be like.

When Google Print launched in the U.S., there was plenty of confusion and anxiety on the part of publishers and authors, especially about Google’s stated intent to digitize the entire contents of libraries, whether or not it had permission from the publishers of the books in question.

An August announcement that the search Goliath had extended English-language book search to 15 countries coincided with a protest from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, which said that authors and artists should be asked for permission before their works were included.

Google Print includes the Google Print Publisher Program, through which publishers can contribute books to be scanned and indexed for search; and the Google Print Library Project, in which Google is scanning and indexing the entire collections of the libraries of the University of Michigan. Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University, as well as public-domain books in the collection of the New York Public Library.

The Association of American Publishers, the American Association of University Presses have protested, while the Authors Guild sued.

While users can go to the book-specific search pages, book results also will be integrated into Google search results pages in each of the countries. Users will be able to click on a “buy the book” link to go to a third party, online bookstore.

The launch follows Google’s August announcement of publisher programs in France, Italy, Germany, Holland and Spain; publisher programs also are in place in Austria, Switzerland and Belgium.

The format follows Google’s controversial U.S. version: Google users can search the full text of every book that the company has scanned. After they click on a book result, they view a bibliographic page and a few sentences of the book containing the keyword. In some cases, publishers have given permission to Google to let users read several pages of the book. Public domain books can be viewed in their entirety.

Google is reaching out to trade groups in each of the countries, Gerber said.

“We’ve tried to make an effort to speak with various organizations in each of the countries,” he said. “I’m sure we’ve hit many, but not all. I think we have fairly good relations with folks in these countries.”

Gerber said that Google had spoken numerous times with all the U.S. organizations before the domestic launch of Google Print, and it had also briefed them in the days prior to the launch of Google Library. He said that the company had announced Google Library earlier than it liked to.

“Normally, we bake something a little more fully, so we can get it out there for people to try before we announce things,” he said. “But we knew the library project would be of interest to our publisher partners, and we didn’t want to embark on scanning without letting them know.”

However, Google did begin scanning books at the University of Michigan in 2002, according to John Wilkin, associate university librarian and chief project manager.

In response to publishers’ concerns, Google instituted a policy by which they could opt out of having books in their catalogs scanned within the Library Project.

Gerber said that Google was honoring the different copyright laws in each country in which it launches book search. “We continue to speak with our publishing partners and various publishing organizations,” he said. We regret that the Authors Guild chose to sue us rather than simply opt out.”

Yahoo Inc. and BellSouth Corp. said Monday they agreed to offer high-speed Internet service across BellSouth’s nine-state region, putting Yahoo one step away from nationwide broadband coverage. In a joint statement, the world’s largest Internet media company and the No. 3 U.S. local phone company said the new service will begin in late 2006, at no additional charge, to all new BellSouth residential broadband subscribers. Yahoo already has broadband partnerships with SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, the No. 1 and No. 2 U.S. local phone service providers. This means Yahoo lacks a deal with Qwest Communications International Inc., the No. 4 local carrier, to fill out a national map, which would allow it to market its services nationally instead of region by region.

Students that aren’t “Googling” now may be diehard fans of the site by the end of the semester.

The search engine, started in a garage by two university students in 1998, has launched a series of free online products and services aimed specifically for college students. Google Talk, Google Scholar, and Gmail are all being aimed at the college audience.

“We think that our mission aligns with university students,” said Debbie Jaffe, the group product marketing manager.

Google Talk is an instant messaging service that utilizes voice technology, while Google Scholar is a massive database of information configured especially for students. The company has said its archives are three times larger than any of its competitions.

Jaffe said most students would probably enjoy the convenience that a virtual library offers.

“We don’t close at 2 a.m.,” she said. “It saves them time and they can do it at whatever time they want.”

Gmail is perhaps the biggest part of the new services. Any student with an .edu e-mail address is eligible for a Gmail account. Gmail has a built-in search feature, which can be used as a second hard drive and contains unlimited storage.

Some said they like the idea of having a site devoted exclusively to their lives and interests. Jessie Cushman, a Detroit sophomore, said he already is a big fan of Google and uses it for all his classes, especially when he has to do research.

“I tend to use Google a little more often than other search engines,” the 24-year-old said. “It’s sort of like a parental guideline.”

Cushman said Google searches help students research efficiently.

Mount Pleasant senior Heather Rosan said anything that makes research better is good with her. Rosan said she had already heard about the new Google site and that she plans to start using it soon.

“People always know that if you want to find something, you can find it on Google,” she said.

Google representatives said students also will be able to find search tips and tricks on the Web site. They include an online calculator, glossary, Q&A, language translator and tips on how to research effectively.

Other students are skeptical about whether or not it’ll have a big impact.

Grayling sophomore Kip Franklin thinks the www.google.com’s new features will only get moderate usage.

“College students will pick and choose,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be that much better than what we have right now.”

Franklin said while the new services may not have a huge impact for the majority of college students, he certainly will be using it.

Google has not said if any more products will come out of this new university site.

Google has recently launched a new service called Google Reader. This service, available at http://reader.google.com/ allows users to search for and easily manage RSS feeds, giving quick and easy access to the most current information and news on the topics that interest you most.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS feeds, they are simply itemized lists in an RSS file that can be pick up and displayed on other websites and or read through the use of RSS readers. Bloggers typically us RSS to syndicate their blog posts. For example, people wishing to keep updated on what’s going on at Google may use a reader to display their RSS feed (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml) thus allowing them instant access to any new posts in their blog.

As most are aware, the popularity of blogs and RSS with it has increased and undoubtedly will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. One has to admit, instant access to up-to-date information on topics of interest has it’s appeal. The launch of Google Reader is a giant step for the average surfer. It provides an easy and powerful tool for visitors to find and manage the feeds they are interested in.

How To Use Google Reader?

For many who are less familiar with RSS, the notion of downloading an RSS reader, configuring it, etc. seems a daunting task when one can simply visit their favorite news site or use the new search feature of their favorite search engine. Understandably there are many who would rather not undertake the task of trying to understand something new when the information they are looking for is otherwise available through other means. While this is true, RSS allows a user to keep updated on the news they might not even be aware of to look for. Google knows this and thus, Google Reader was born.

To use Google Reader (and I high recommend at least giving it a quick try) you will need to take the following steps:

1. Visit the Google Reader site at http://reader.google.com/.
2. Use the search box for a topic of interest (”google” for example)
3. Look through the results for a feed of interest (I personally chose “Google News”)
4. Click “Subscribe”

That’s all there is to signing up for a feed. You can sign up for one or many of them.

At this point you’re probably wondering what you just got for this 20 seconds of effort. If we now click back to the reader homepage (add it to your Favorites for easy access in the future) you see on the left-hand side a list of the feeds you’ve subscribed to. If you choose a feed, on the right hand side you’ll see all the new posts to that feed.

This is perhaps one of the best products to come from Google in quite a while. I’ll admit that the folks at Google are seldom short of interesting and innovative ideas however from a usability and “making your life easier” standpoint the system they have developed here allows even the less technical to easily gain access to current information and keep updated effortlessly.

Who Should Use It?

Quite honestly Google Reader, due to its power and easy of use, is a helpful tool for virtually anybody who wants to keep themselves updated on information from world news to hockey scores. That said, there are definitely people who will be prone to become “power users” of this service. People who need quick access to the most current information, from reporters and researchers to business people and consultants will find this service invaluable. I know as an SEO that I’ll be using it often as keeping on top of even the smallest changes, services and search engine updates can be crucial to the success of a campaign.

Advanced Features

While all of the benefits noted above are good for the average user, they have also added some advanced features. The advanced features include:

GMail this - Never ones’ to miss an opportunity to promote their own services and drop some ads in it, they have added a link to “GMail this” to others. Of course you have to have a GMail account to use the service which means you either have to be invited by and existing GMail user of have a mobile phone and be living in the US.

Blog This! - This is definitely my favorite of the advanced features. If you’re using Blogger (again, a Google property) you can click the “Blog This!” link and it will open a window to your Blogger account and insert a link to the blog you want to reference.

What Does This Mean For SEO’s?

The launch of Google Reader stands to make blogs and RSS an even more important componant in a thorough Internet Marketing strategy. With content syndicationnow made so much easier for the average user, it’s popularity is sure to climbsignificantly. People will begin reading and using feeds more regularly and it won’t just be the more technical that can benefit from this highly effectivecommunications method.

By using the knowledge we gained from previous articles on how to find mp3 files using the google search engine we will be able to easily find other files as well using almost the same search techniques.

The main ebook format is .pdf, but ebooks also are delivered as .chm, doc and even .txt format. That means we will have to include at least pdf, doc and chm to get good results in our searches. Ebooks are unfortunatly sometimes packed, that means you probably would like to include zip and rar as well to your search

(pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar)

To get good results we need to exclude the following -inurl:htm -inurl:html

To search for directories that contain ebooks you use the following search string.

-inurl:htm -inurl:asp -inurl:html (“index of”|”last modified”|”parent of”) AND (”ebook”|”ebooks”|”book”|”books”) AND (pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar) AND “Oct-2005″

You should really add another keyword, a title, author or publisher to get better results than that general search. Simply add the keyword at the end of your search using +”keyword”

Fellow “former VC who returned to the bright side” Tony Conrad kindly gave me a preview of Sphere, ex-Yodel Search, at the Web 2.0 conference, and re-kindly gave me access to the beta version of this new blog search engine, “that uses an advanced algorithm to discover high-quality, relevant, and timely blog posts”.

You might think: why do we need yet another blog search engine – especially after Google launched BlogSearch ? The team behind Sphere provides a pre-scripted answer, since one can bet they’ll hear that question many times over:

The first part of that question is easy: We thought we could build a much better search engine to serve the rapidly growing blogosphere.

When we started building Sphere, there were around five million blogs. Nine months later, there were more than 19 million blogs. With so many people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, finding high-quality, relevant content has become difficult. For a variety of complex technical reasons (such as an exclusive emphasis on freshness, or an overly simplistic computation of a blogger’s authority) other blog search services deliver less-than-satisfying results. Our new, advanced algorithm rapidly sorts through all blogs to find high-quality, relevant content that matches a blog search query.

The second part of that question (you know, the Google part) is a little bit harder to explain. Our corporate therapist hasn’t led us to the answer yet, but we think it’s because we saw firsthand through Oddpost that size doesn’t always matter. We like our product and hope you will, too. And who doesn’t love an underdog anyway?

In no particular order, here are a few initial remarks I have regarding Sphere (initial because I am “waking up” in three two hours to catch a plane to NYC):

*
It crawls the blog website, extracting the full text from all posts, and not the feed. Its current archive dates back January 2003 but the index can be back-filled by crawling blog archives.
*
The engine seems to do a good job at extracting the actual content of pages, and not include “surroundings” like blogrolls. A search on “Jeff Clavier” only returned posts containing my name (sorry, for now only the beta users will be able to access these results). The engine actually behaves more like a feed search engine since basic search unit is the individual post.
*
There is however an issue with the fact that some of these aggregator blogs that suck my feed (and others) to build vertical content sites get predominantly displayed. This proves the fact that Sphere does a good job at clustering information, but these should be removed from the index – or they should be given lower priority.
*
Sphere SearchSphere seems to do a great job queries containing a few keywords. A search on “open source crm” retrieves very relevant posts, much more so than other blog search engines. Switching the sorting to ‘date’ returns results which are far less relevant, and include a bunch of spam blogs.
*
I like the idea of displaying relevant blogs and news article for a particular search term. What is not clear to me is which news source are used currently (CNet ?), and how “relevant” blogs are picked up (search term included in the blog description?). For example, none of the blogs related to Venture Capital include the established VC blogs.
*
Also a good idea, building a profile for each blog included in the index. The information currently displayed is not that interesting though (avg posts per week, avg number of words per post, and recent outbound links). I’d rather see recent posts – including the number of references on each post, recent inbound links, etc.
*
The overall UI is actually quite clean. I sense the touch of Adaptive Path in the design (?).

We’ll have to see how well the engine scales at capacity – once the index has been backfilled and users are banging on it. But it certainly looks interesting and seems to deliver on the promise of higher relevance which is a big deal. I should point out that Om and Mike recently wrote about Sphere as well.

Congrats to Tony and team!

PS: You can leave your email address on the Sphere home page if you are interested in joining the beta program, but I understand that there are thousands of people on the waiting list. If you are at BlogOn ‘05, ask Tony for a demo.
PPS: Almost forgot - I don’t have any ties with Sphere (especially since I am an angel investor in Feedster but Tony and I share a number of good friends here and in France.

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam expressed concern Saturday about a free mapping program from Google Inc., warning it could help terrorists by providing satellite photos of potential targets.

Google Earth, an Internet site launched in June this year, allows users to access overlapping satellite photos. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive locations in various countries.

At a meeting of top police officials in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, Kalam said he worried that “developing countries, which are already in danger of terrorist attacks, have been singularly chosen” for providing high resolution images of their sites.

The governments of South Korea and Thailand and lawmakers in the Netherlands have expressed similar concerns.

South Korean newspapers said Google Earth provides images of the presidential Blue House and military bases in the country, which remains technically at war with communist North Korea. The North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon is among sites in that country displayed on the service.

The Google site contains clear aerial photos of India’s parliament building, the president’s house and surrounding government offices in New Delhi. There are also some clear shots of Indian defense establishments.

Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources and the images displayed are about one to two years old, not shown in real time.

“Google takes governmental concerns about Google Earth and Google Maps very seriously. Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to Indian authorities about any concerns they may have,” Frost said in an e-mail statement Saturday.

Kalam, a scientist who guided India’s missile program before becaming president, called for new laws to restrain dissemination of such material. He said existing laws in some countries regarding spatial observations of their territory and the United Nations’ recommendations on the practice are inadequate.